The young man had a thin face with lines of suffering round the mouth and eyes. The warm room had given him a high colour, which increased his air of fragility. He felt a little choked by the place, which seemed to him for both body and mind a hot-house, though he knew very well that the Nirski Palace on this gala evening was in no way typical of the land or its masters. Only a week ago he had been eating black bread with its owner in a hut on the Volhynian front. "You have become amazing, Saskia," he said. "I won't pay my old playfellow compliments; besides, you must be tired of them. I wish you happiness all the day long like a fairy-tale Princess. But a crock like me can't do much to help you to it. The service seems to be the wrong way round, for here you are wasting your time talking to me." She put her hand on his. "Poor Quentin! Is the leg very bad?" He laughed. "Oh, no. It's mending famously. I'll be able to get about without a stick in another month, and then you've got to teach me all the new dances." The jigging music of a two-step floated down the corridor. It made the young man's brow contract, for it brought to him a vision of dead faces in the gloom of a November dusk. He had once had a friend who used to whistle that air, and he had seen him die in the Hollebeke mud. There was something _macabre_ in the tune.... He was surely morbid this evening, for there seemed something _macabre_ about the house, the room, the dancing, all Russia.... These last days he had suffered from a sense of calamity impending, of a dark curtain drawing down upon a splendid world. They didn't agree with him at the Embassy, but he could not get rid of the notion. The girl saw his sudden abstraction. "What are you thinking about?" she asked. It had been her favourite question as a child. "I was thinking that I rather wished you were still in Paris." "But why?" "Because I think you would be safer." "Oh, what nonsense, Quentin dear! Where should I be safe if not in my own Russia, where I have friends--oh, so many, and tribes and tribes of relations? It is France and England that are unsafe with the German guns grumbling at their doors.... My complaint is that my life is too cosseted and padded. I am too secure, and I do not want to be secure." The young man lifted a heavy casket from a table at his elbow. It was of dark green imperial jade, with a wonderfully carved lid. He took off the lid and picked up three small oddments of ivory--a priest with a beard, a tiny soldier and a draught-ox. Putting the three in a triangle, he balanced the jade box on them. "Look, Saskia! If you were living inside that box you would think it very secure. You would note the thickness of the walls and the hardness of the stone, and you would dream away in a peaceful green dusk. But all the time it would be held up by trifles--brittle trifles."